Chapter 25: Angola Days
Just outside Tsumeb lies a very deep hole – the legendarily bottomless Lake Otjikoto. The one I still call Leguan Lake.
Jules and I parked at the entrance, in front of a tall, rather dramatic carving of many startled faces in a tree stump. Which stood just to the left of a large mural of an attractive Herero woman drinking an amber-coloured liquid, captioned thus:
“Lake Otjikoto Here you are; Touch African curios at the kiosk; Taste sweets, fruit cooldrinks and biltong love bites and enjoy Otjikoto.”
The shop owner, an amiable old man, took us on a brief tour of his strange carved-animal garden, replete with parrots, guinea pigs and a crocodile lurking in the shade.
“And here are photographs of the cannons that were hauled out of the lake in 1983,” he said. “The Germans dropped them into the lake at the end of World War I. You can see them at the Tsumeb Museum.”
I bought some of those romantic biltong bits (rather yummy, actually) and had an impromptu picnic with Jules within sight of the deep, azure waters of Otjikoto.
“We used to come here a lot in the old days,” I said. “Before there was a shop and a crocodile pit. This was where I met the Leguan of the Lake.”
“Give me another love bite and you can tell me all about it,” said my wife.
“On one trip, my detail was to escort a refrigerator truck full of perishables to a camp on the Angolan border and return in a Land Rover,” I began. “Which was fine, as long as Ace, cold stone killer of an army truck, wasn’t doing any of the driving.
“We used to come here to throw bread to the tilapia in the lake. This time, we found a one-metre leguan (rock monitor lizard) at the roadside nearby. It looked as if someone had driven over his back. There was life but, like the rest of us, unless you took a pulse you wouldn’t have said so.”
Using the Don Quixote trick with mirrors, we surrounded the animal with many silver boxes from the food truck, all but one of them reflecting the wicked sun’s rays. The antediluvian creature waddled its way into the shady box with the lid up and we had him.
Braised steak was the lizard’s lunch. We poured the stew over his head while he glared at us, the congealing mass of stew slowly dribbling down his warty face.
The lizard was deposited in the back of the truck, where he promptly lowered his metabolic rate to cope with the freezing temperature, and we drove on towards the camp on the border.
Four hours later, we arrived and opened the tin box. The leguan was still in a state of silent fury, and hadn’t touched a morsel. He seemed to know all about army ration packs.
We left him to wander about the camp. In fact, we never saw him again, but news of his exploits reached our ears months later. He’d somehow made his way into a helicopter and when the chopper pilot took off on his evening reconnaissance flight, the lizard went berserk and forced him to make a very hasty landing.
I left the border camp the next day, bound for Grootfontein in a Land Rover with the driver and signalman for company.
Three hours out, something in the engine went Spang! and we found ourselves in the dead-hush of the northern scrublands with a tin of bully beef and two smokes to share between us.
So we set up a cigarette roadblock and stopped civilians mad enough to travel the Great White.
A large trucker gave us a couple of menthol smokes, a little old lady in a Mini Minor handed over half a pack of Texan Plains and both parties were released on their own recognisances.
“Why are you dressed like hoboes in those overalls?” they wanted to know.
“We’re from Grootfontein,” I growled at them.
Ah, yes, they nodded. They had heard about our camp of retards.
The day wore on. We just sat in the heat. And sat some more. Like baboons on a rock, we quibbled a little and then lapsed into a mindless, staring silence.
Finally, we were rescued by some engineers. Back in camp, my store partner Jimmy told me the good news:
“A guy called Vermeulen is prepared to give us a case of beers a week if we make a nest for him at the back of the store.”
The nest was simple: we moved two columns of huge tyres out, thus creating a double bed-sized cavity in the storage area. Vermeulen did the rest. He dragged in two mattresses, a pile of magazines and about enough beer to satisfy a large Australian wedding party. And then he simply disappeared.
Jimmy and I would go about our business of minding the store each day, and now and again we would hear a gentle snore from the back.
We never saw Vermeulen again, but every Friday there would be two dozen ice-cold Windhoek Lagers laid out for us on the toolbox in the store. And when someone in authority ever approached, we would just raise our voices and clang about with tyre levers, to drown out the snores of the King of Grootfontein: Vermeulen, the laziest man alive.
Pretty soon the Min Dae (Few Days) syndrome struck. I knocked 40 nails halfway into the splitpole wall of our store. Each morning we would fight over who was to smash another nail in, signifying one day closer to Civilian Street.
Mal Smit was celebrating his 40 Days thing in true style. Each week, he would mail a little piece of his jackhammer home to his mother in Otjiwarongo.
Corporal Kat had vowed to stop Mal Smit from stealing military equipment, but Smit outsmarted him every time. Kat resorted to blockading the Grootfontein post office. Mal Smit still managed to send off some part of his jackhammer each week. The main body of the jackhammer grew thinner and thinner as our time of departure approached.
The drivers decided to hold a 40 Days party out at the shooting range, where no one could remember the last person to qualify for a sharpshooter badge.
The party began hectically and held its pace right through the evening. At about midnight I was well-oiled and starved. I grabbed a piece of steak, flung it on the grill, turned to shout at someone and then immediately took the meat off and ate it raw.
Finally, someone dropped us off at our tent just before 2 am and I passed out on my bed, sick to my gut. Corporal Kat lumbered in and told me I was on guard duty.
After a lot of noise, it was agreed that I should stand guard right outside my tyre store. So off I sloped, in no shape at all.
I found a pile of used truck-tyres outside my store. But first, I had to get rid of the raw meat inside me. Then I returned to the tyres and dived in.
The next morning, I was sitting holding my head at the fold-up desk, shuffling papers and breathing to the strangely comforting rhythm of Vermeulen’s snoring at the back, when my friend Claude Maladjusted walked in.
“Funny thing happened to me out in the park,” he told me in his unconcerned hippy way. “I saw this thing on the ground, it looked like a red rubber discus. So I kicked it. So it just disintegrated under my takkie. You know what? I don’t think it was a discus after all.” And then he sauntered out.
Three years later, I found myself sitting under a bridge somewhere in the Orange Free State, wondering where life would take me next. I’d just finished final exams at varsity and was hiking up to Pretoria to be a newspaper reporter.
It was relatively safe and easy to hitchhike about the country in those days. That night was difficult. I suppose, in the fading Free State light, the sight of a bearded, long-haired scruff with a rucksack and a thumb in the air inspired no one to stop.
I made a small fire, ate a packet of crisps, drank deep from a bottle of Old Brown Sherry and went to sleep at the side of the highway.
In the morning, I washed my teeth with sherry and slipped under the back of the flyover and used the South West Africa section of my roadmap for toilet paper. Big mistake. Two weeks later I received call-up papers to go play in the army again. And my three-month sojourn would take me through the heart of South West.
You’d think by now they would have lost my file at military headquarters. I had not covered myself with glory during my national service. But they wanted me back in uniform and shipped, after some refresher training, into Angola.
I had no idea what that war was about. It was still all Tigger and Woozel stuff to me. I was, however, well aware that it was a case of dog biscuits or detention barracks. So I bitched and moaned in my usual brave style, dug out some old army kit and found my way to De Brug (near Bloemfontein) for three weeks of fitness training, fire and movement.
I fell in with a bunch of like-minded guys and we moved into a tent together and slept on the ground. Life was made interesting by one Lance Corporal Cuddle, bagpiper for the regiment and member of our ten-man squad.
Every morning just before dawn, the bagpipe warm-up session sounded like seven cats in a bag trying to do each other grievous sexual bodily harm. Everyone swore at Cuddle.
But I grew to love his pipes dearly. Once he had them tuned, they were pure single malt. Cuddle would stride off into the morning like a warrior from Glenfiddich or Glen Grant. Somewhere there.
Then there was Gus the Gunner, a stocky, swarthy man given to acts of generosity, short outbursts of prayer and muttered words of devotion to his beloved machine gun. Gus could also run all day and never break his stride.
Bob the Bird Man and I were the only unmarried ones in the section, so they made us scouts and our job was to walk ahead of the rest of the mob on patrol. When you could snap his nose out of the Roberts Birds of South Africa and direct his mind to matters on the ground, Bob seemed quite affable. He was, in today’s parlance, a twitcher.
I somehow lost interest in keeping myself clean after the first three days at this bush camp. Hell, they make you sleep on the ground, they make you run around all day and clean your rifle at all hours and then they expect you to rush off and shower so you can get dirty all over again. Forget that for a lark. They called me Pigpen. I didn’t care.
I remember three things from that Angola training camp: Cuddle’s bagpipes, singing Welsh coal mining songs for beer in the Officers’ Mess and, after three weeks of lousy food, finding out that the cooks had kept all the best meat cuts for themselves. Dealing with those cooks was difficult because they had protection from the brass and could run quite fast.
Four cramped train-days later, we arrived at Grootfontein. I was the only one in my group who had been there before. I told them all the old stories, about what a cute little camp this was, the deaf Major, the hookers at the Meteor Hotel, and so on. Even gave them a rundown of my lovely tyre store, which had been my domain four years previously.
So what had happened to my little camp? What was this massive, sprawling city before me? The sign said Grootfontein, but the village had grown into one massive troop displacement complex. Thousands of tents lay before us, jets roaring above, trucks lined up in their hundreds, armour pieces in full array, rows upon rows of riflemen running this way and that. It was like a Hollywood epic. The only thing is: Hollywood and the CIA had left the building.
The war had turned serious while I wasn’t looking.
They gave us brand-new trucks, German Unimogs, piles of ration packs and pointed us in the general direction of Luanda. I’ve no idea where we went, because then we operated on a need-to-know basis. No one thought we needed to know. Except for the thing with the tanks. Which, in fact, we didn’t need to know.
Some guys from Military Intelligence choppered down and told us all about the new-fangled Russian tanks we could expect to see bearing down on our positions shortly. They had fearsome guns, impenetrable armour and could see at night with infra-red sights.
That’s it. I’m pissing off home, I said. Began gathering up my few things and walking south. Ten minutes later I found myself back in our base, having marched off in a semicircle. I was a human boomerang.
At night, we used to lie in trenches on guard, two guys at a time, talking about the Russian tanks. All we had was one machine gunner and a drunken mortar man. Between them they might just have been able to scratch the side of the Russian tank.
Every day, we moved positions so nobody could get a fix on where we were, including ourselves. Cuddle’s bagpipes were banned in the bush, so we gave him all our ratpacks and there was a hot meal waiting for us each evening when we returned.
I was totally night blind. We all discovered this one night on patrol when I led the boys in the wrong direction, fell into a donga and knocked myself out for a couple of hours. I woke up in total darkness, nearly wet myself and went back to sleep again. By the light of an Angolan dawn, I saw I was only five metres out of camp. No more night moves for us.
Bob the Birder was almost worse. He would spot a double-crested-triple-billed necktwitter in a tree, haul out his Roberts, confirm the sighting and then follow it for the rest of the afternoon. Not realising that he was actually leading us all after the bird and away from the patrol path.
The only shot I ever fired in Angola was a panicky round loosed off at an Angolan steer. Our lieutenant decided we needed fresh meat after our ratpacks failed to drop out of the sky.
So we found this herd of cattle and chased a steer across the road at the back of the Unimog, where the lieutenant was waiting, perched on the tailboard, his rifle at port. He shot the animal, it fell down and he motored off in the Mog to get more support and a big knife. It was barbecue time. I was left in charge of the Angolan steer.
I had a smoke, whittled some wood, thought about writing a letter and then, suddenly, the beefer came alive again and charged me like Angry Meat from Hell, with his eyes distended, his jaw flapping and his horns aimed at my chest. I dropped him two feet from me and stood there shaking. War is hell.
The braai afterwards was even less of a success. Our leader had shot the fellow in the spleen, so the meat was off. Cuddle made us a Dog Biscuit Delight and we all spent the afternoon on our truck, tanning in rifle oil. And then we were given two days’ leave at Calueque Dam, got drunk and were thrown into detention for the rest of our time.
“So now let’s go off to Grootfontein,” I said to Jules a lifetime later, as we finished our snack and headed for the car park. “I have to put some ghosts to bed …”